Reading Chaucer in time : literary formation in England and Italy / Kara Gaston.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gaston, Kara, author.

Contributor:

Albert C. Baugh Book Fund.

Series:

Oxford studies in medieval literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Troilus and Criseyde.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Canterbury tales.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400--Influence.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400.

Canterbury tales (Chaucer, Geoffrey).

Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer, Geoffrey).

Reading--Italy.

Reading.

Italian literature--To 1400--History and criticism.

Italian literature.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Italy.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

ix, 202 pages ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford Universiy Press, 2020.

Summary:

Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

Contents:

1 Form and Formation in the Vita nuova, Filostrato, and Troilus and Criseyde p. 15

2 Writing Readers in the Thebaid, Teseida, and Knight's Tale p. 48

3 Learning in Time: Intellectual Formation in the Griselda Story p. 84

4 Assembling the Times in the Metamorphoses, Filocolo, and Franklins Tale p. 116

5 How Much Is Enough in the Monk's Tale? Setting Boundaries in Humanist Biography p. 144.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Albert C. Baugh Book Fund.

ISBN:

9780198852865

019885286X

OCLC:

1121284413

Publisher Number:

99985018775